st devious windings into the lowest haunts. For him the
resources of dissipation are never exhausted. Pot-houses provide him
with cocktails, restaurants furnish him with elaborate dinners, tailors
array him in fine clothes, hosiers collar him up to the chin, and cover
his breast with immaculate fronts. The master-pieces of West-End
jewellers, hatters, and boot-makers, sparkle on various portions of his
person; he finds in a lady step-dancer a goddess, and in _Ruff's Guide_
a Bible; he sups, he swears, he drinks, and he gambles, and, finally, he
attains to the summit of earthly felicity by finding himself mentioned
under a nickname in the paragraphs of a sporting organ.

Having about the same time engaged in a midnight brawl with an
undersized and middle-aged cabman, he appears the next morning in a
Police Court, and, after being fined forty shillings, is hailed as a
hero by his companions, and recognised as a genuine Patron of Sport by
the world at large. Henceforward his position is assured. He becomes the
boon companion of Music-hall Chairmen, and lives on terms of intimate
vulgarity with Money-lenders, who find that it pays to take a low
interest in the pleasures, in order the more easily to obtain a high
interest on the borrowings, of reckless young men.

[Illustration]

In company with these associates, and with others of more or less
repute, the Patron of Sport sets the seal to his patronage by becoming a
member of a so-called Sporting Club, at which professional pugilists
batter one another in order to provide excitement for a mixed assemblage
of coarse and brainless rowdies and the feeble toadies who dance
attendance upon them. Here the Patron is at his best and noblest. Though
he has never worn a glove in anger, nor indeed taken the smallest part
in any genuine athletic exercise, he is as free with his opinions as he
is unsparing of the adjectives wherewith he adorns them. He talks
learnedly of "upper-cuts" and "cross-counters," and grows humorous over
"mouse-traps," "pile-drivers on the mark," and "the flow of the ruby."
Having absorbed four whiskeys-and-soda, he will observe that
"if a fellow refuses to train properly, he must expect to be
receiver-general," and, after lighting his tenth cigar as a tribute,
presumably, to the lung power of the combatants, will indulge in some
moody reflections on the decay of British valour and the general
degeneracy of Englishmen. He will then drink liqueur brandy out of a